Monterey Bay

Software Development and Applications Support

Since its creation by the National Science Foundation and the state of Illinois in 1986, NCSA has been a leader in working with and supporting scientific and engineering communities through the development, deployment, and use of new computing and software technologies.

Software development: Software for analyzing scientific data is increasingly important as scientific data volumes are rapidly increasing; broad community access to data analysis and visualization tools, as well as the data sets, is needed. Researchers collect data; integrate data from multiple sources; model and simulate phenomena; mine, analyze, and visualize data; and collaborate with remote colleagues. This requires an extensive, robust, and reliable cyberinfrastructure. To realize the full benefits of a national cyberinfrastructure, we must make the cyberinfrastructure as accessible and usable as web browsers made the Internet. NCSA is committed to developing the individual tools and integrated, end-to-end software systems—cyberinfrastructure environments or cyberenvironments—required to meet this challenge.

Applications support: Scientists and researchers from a wide variety of disciplines make use of the cyberinfrastructure, both developing their own software and using community codes. NCSA works with these researchers providing computational as well as domain experience to ensure that they make best use of the cyberinfrastructure, whether systems at NCSA such as Blue Waters, or national resources such as those connected by the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE).

Cactus Code — open source problem solving environment designed for scientists and engineers, with a modular structure that easily enables parallel computation across different architectures and collaborative code development between different groups

CILogon — service facilitating secure single sign on access to cyberinfrastructure (CI) via a number of available credentials (e.g. university credentials)